I looked at 200+ FAANG resumes that actually got interviews. Here's what I found.

I went into this expecting to find some secret sauce. What I actually found was more boring and more useful than that . Over the past few months I've been obsessively collecting anonymised resumes from people who got into Google, Meta, Amazon and similar. Specifically ones where I could also see the version that didn't get through. Two hundred and something applications, plus conversations with a handful of recruiters who work at places recieving millions of apps a year. The patterns that emerged were pretty consistent. Annoyingly so, actually... The recruiter attention thing is real, and it's brutal. There's a Ladders eye-tracking study that gets cited endlessly, and I used to roll my eyes at it. Six or seven seconds before they decide? Surely not. But after talking to actual recruiters who are processing hundreds of resumes a week, I believe it now. They're not reading. They're scanning for signals, numbers, company names, technologies they recognise. If those signals aren't visible